Bradford should have a directly elected mayor and actually if you want a person who could be that mayor you could ask for no one better than the man who saved this building, John Pennington. But I'm going to start with the most important part of this debate which is the need for a mayor, the need to change the system of government in this city because that's much more important than the issue of personality, or the issue of who that mayor should be. Right now, we have an opaque, barely accountable approach where who leads the city isn't decided by we the people, it's decided by them the councillors. And it's decided in closed party meetings, behind closed doors and not through open debate.

At Respect we want you to vote yes for a directly elected mayor. So it's not the first time we're going to be going against the political establishment, and perhaps not the first time we're going to beat them as well. What we want to see with a directly elected mayor - we could have a transformation within our city within days and within weeks with a directly elected mayor. And this is a change that we haven't seen in our city for 20 years.

By voting yes for a directly elected mayor, we're voting yes for a powerful passionate local champion who will be a voice for all of the city and also a champion for all of the city as well.

We've got a referendum that most people will ignore, on a subject that most people probably will oppose and in these circumstances we can't even make an informed decision - that does not strike me as intelligent politics.

The Greens do not want elected mayors in Bradford or any other part of the North of England as they concentrate too much power in the hands of one person at the expense of the other councillors and let's face it we have a lot of good councillors on Bradford Council.

An elected mayor would be responsible for a wide range of areas of policy, including setting the budget and would have significant power, far more so than the current leader of the council and the leaflet does not tell you that it would take a 2/3rds council majority to overrule the mayor's budget, no matter how bad the budget was.

You need to be clear that an elected mayor can ignore the wishes of those local communities, can ignore the wishes of the local councillors that you will continue to represent. They will become a cypher - your ability to influence through the electoral process on a year on year basis will disappear as the mayoral grip from the centre decreases.

You will be left with a situation where the only influence your local councillors will have is to try and block budgets and block projects and that will bring the system grinding to a halt. I would urge you to be very careful what you wish for and I would urge you to think carefully if you want one person far away from the your doorstep making all your decision or do you want to work with a system – where you can annually influence what happens in Bradford and your community. I would urge you to think carefully of the way forward for this city that we live in and we all love.

We've seen examples from history where people have made it exciting and people have joined rallies and followed people up and down the streets and we've seen the consequences of some of those actions as minority people have become the problem that we need to sort out in order to make everything a much better world.

There's a huge change taking place in the political system and its being pushed by a Prime Minister who says we will threaten you if you don't do what we say – we will not give you a seat at the table if you don't do what we say. So the biggest shift in power in the country is taking place off the back of a question we don't understand and threats being given out into the Yorkshire Post about what will happen to Bradford if it doesn't have a mayor.